Attention chumps: If you, despite all our dire warnings, decided to put your newsletter on Substack, the untrustworthy asses who run the company just did what we all knew they would, and made it impossible to take your subscribers with you if you want to leave. support.substack.com/hc/en-us/art...

Other states sending troops to the capital include Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina. Read the full story:

BREAKING: Three more states are sending National Guard troops to the nation's capital, with the White House stating they could be armed. Mississippi pledged to send about 200 Guard troops. About 160 Tennessee Guard troops will depart this week. Louisiana has promised to send 135 troops. #Flashes

A massive attack on several humanities units (Arabic Studies, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Classics, Religion, German & Scandinavian, Russian/East European/Eurasian Studies) *and* tenure now unfolding at the University of Oregon (a blue state!). Closure of units and faculty layoffs threatened.

Insurance is one of those things you just can't bullshit or fake, as authoritarians try to do with many other things via control of information. Losses are losses, and when they're bigger than expected, the firms go broke

Job growth is decelerating as huge amounts of policy uncertainty from POTUS reduces businesses’ willingness to invest: +128K/mo over most-recent 12 months +81K/mo over most-recent 6 months +35K/mo over most-recent 3 months +73K this past month

When you strip away humanity

This is a good read

The US DOD announces OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI have won DOD contracts, each with a $200M ceiling, aimed at enabling agentic AI workflows and more (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Starting July 25, Bluesky will require users in the UK to scan their face, upload an ID or verify their identity with a bankcard. I realize that platforms feel they have no choice but to comply with the government surveillance schemes, but shocking nonetheless.

We are still so heartbroken. May their memories inspire us to change.

Zohran Mamdani’s win has inspired over 3400 young people to raise their hands to run for office just since Tuesday. It’s now @runforsomething.net’s biggest candidate recruitment moment since the election. A new generation of leaders is here.

People in wheelchairs are getting arrested right now in the Russell Senate Office Building in DC. They showed up to tell Congress not to cut their Medicaid, because they cant afford health care without it. If you look closely you can see the zip ties on their hands. #WeWontGetOverLosingMedicaid

A lot of people will say "it's obviously fake" but that's missing the bigger problem. We're now having to expend more and more mental effort to ensure the media we consume is real. The ultimate effect is that everyone will distrust everything they don't want to believe. It only helps authoritarians.

The refusal to publicly offer evidence to justify the *use of military force* is a key step toward autocratization because it rejects the notion that this government owes the people it rules an explanation of its actions.

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop! Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

I did my best to compile as many protest safety notes as possible into a one page foldout zine! Coincidentally…it seems the file has breached containment…like it’s available for anyone to print or hand out 👀⚖️ toonyart.com/s/PSZine.pdf

We've just updated the @wired.com guide to protecting your privacy while attending protests with the latest best practices. @agreenberg.bsky.social and @lhn.bsky.social report: www.wired.com/story/how-to...

Asking questions is what I have been doing my entire career.

Statement from Sen. Alex Padilla's office:

Never hurts to repost.

Sitting US Senator Alex Padilla forcibly wrestled to the ground and arrested by the FBI for attempting to ask a question of DHS secretary Kristin Noem.

We’ve leapt over a lot of red lines in the last week. But one I find most worrying is Trump/MAGA/ICE have ceased even pretending to claim some criminal pretext for cracking down on protected speech. It’s just straight up “if you criticize us, you’re getting throttled/arrested/disappeared.”

Amazing how hard it is to write: “Police shoot at journalists.”

"If you saw all this in any other country — soldiers sent to crush dissent, union leaders arrested, opposition politicians threatened — it would be clear that autocracy had arrived."

"Tanner, a chemist at the Univ. of Mississippi working to develop a novel approach for treating glioblastoma, was notified in April that the grant was terminated. “I would like to cure brain cancer,” Dr. Tanner said. “I think that's not particularly controversial.” www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This city girl may be finally countrified... walked a contractor around my very wet, very wooded property this AM. Spiders, spider webs, chance of a snake anywhere today... and I am like...

Scholars been saying this too...but heck we've decided against expertise so...

A radical transformation of our way of life is underway. Don’t let anyone gaslight you into thinking this administration is normal.

"the departures mean large parts of the federal government are essentially fading to black, with services, functions, and research projects going offline, one after another after another." www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

I try to cope with the Horrors but every day there's at least one story that just fills me with an overwhelming sense of dread

The Dept. of Justice has filed its first voter suppression lawsuit aimed at disenfranchising voters. This is a critical juncture for democracy. Paige and I discuss the implications and how it echoes claims made by failed state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin. youtu.be/8XEW-Ga428M

REPORTER: When could the administration resume interviews for foreign students visa? TRUMP: On what? REPORTER: Foreign student visas TRUMP: For the French? REPORTER: All the foreign students TRUMP: What are you referring-- foreign visas for what?

I'm old. I am thinking of all the wonderful secretaries and assistants I have worked with over 30 years ... who helped me get expenses in, dot i's; cross t's. Some of them have passed; some retired. Regardless, I am blessing them all right now as I attempt to battle CONCUR.

"The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

We now get to join Ohio and Texas....

If you want a sneak peak into our future imagine the politicization of everything. Whether the government performs a function entirely dependent on whether the government likes you. You want your social security check? Small business loan? Let's have a look at your facebook posts first

The so-called "AI moratorium" in the big bill is an existential threat to tech accountability and state sovereignty generally, not just a minor AI special treatment. It defines AI to mean any meaningful use of a computer, blocks enforcement of state laws against "AI", and has broken exceptions. 1/6

It's likely the Ohio Texas playbook. I'm betting we'll see it spelled out more plainly in the new budget at the 11th hour.

BREAKING: The Supreme Court just effectively overruled 90 years of precedent on the shadow docket, greenlighting Trump's firing of multi-member agency leaders while their cases are pending—despite Congress' effort to protect them against removal. A huge decision. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

BREAKING: A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from dismantling the Department of Education and ordered the administration to reinstate employees fired in a mass termination. This can't happen without cnogressional approval, she ruled. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

In the past 18 hours, Acyn with Meidas was up all night. He posted 32 clips of Democrats opposing the budget on the floor, 24 clips of Dems in the Rules Committee, and 18 clips of interviews we did of Dems off the floor. We also spotlighted many Dems who never get media airtime.

As fog blanketed Seattle, @knibbs.bsky.social's waited to meet @jay.bsky.team—CEO of Bluesky. Fittingly, just before she arrived, the skies cleared. It felt poetic. Her name, Lantian, means “blue sky” in Mandarin. And her mission? Clear the smog from social media.

Russell Vought, acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell Americans’ most sensitive data, credit history, and Social Security numbers.

“The Brussels Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that the use of tracking by online advertisers relies on an inadequate consent model and is illegal in Europe.” therecord.media/eu-court-rul...

The State Department must release the memo we’ve FOIA’d showing there were not sufficient grounds for revoking Rümeysa Öztürk’s visa. The government is not allowed to hide information to conceal wrongdoing, which is exactly what’s happening here.

This is what bullies do -- they get people to react. Up, down, good, bad, amazing, horrible, wonderful, nasty. How can we be so gullible?

you want to know one reason people are losing trust in the media? it’s the total inability to call things what they are some guy on YouTube: “wow this is the most corrupt shit I’ve ever seen” the Times: “critics say it raises appearance of impropriety” who are people going to take seriously?

Genuinely tyrannical

> @jemelehill.bsky.social